Due to the proliferation of wireless networks, there are a continually increasing number of wireless devices in use today. These devices include mobile telephones, personal digital assistance (PDAs) with wireless communication capabilities, two-way pagers and the like. Concurrently with the increase of available wireless devices, software applications running on such devices have increased their utility. For example, the wireless device may include an application that retrieves a weather report for a list of desired cities or an application that allows a user to shop for groceries.
Such software applications take advantage of the ability to transmit data of the wireless network in order to provide timely and useful services to users, often in addition to voice communication. However, due to a plethora of different types of devices and modes of wireless communication, the restricted resources of some devices and/or communication modes, and the complexity of delivering large amounts of data to the devices, developing software applications remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
With the advent of multi-mode devices (for example, devices that combine wireless local area networks (e.g. technologies under the Wi-Fi or WiMAX brands) and wireless wide area networks (e.g. cellular technologies like GSM/GPRS/EDGE) applications can have the ability to offer different usage models depending on the mode of wireless operation selected. There are two problems application developers may wish to consider when developing applications for multi-mode devices that they would not consider for single-mode devices: (i) application behaviour may need to be constant regardless of the mode of wireless operation and (ii) application behaviour may be tailored based on the current mode of operation. It is suggested that the first problem may be addressed by lower-level interfaces and therefore be transparent at the application layer. Therefore what is desired is a solution to assist developers of wireless applications to define applications for multi-mode operation that tailors behaviour in response to the current mode of operation.
Systems and methods have been created for developing component-based applications for executing on a computing device, often a wireless communication device. More details regarding component application can be found in Patent Cooperation Treaty Application Numbers PCT/CA2003/001976 entitled, “System and Method for Building and Execution of Platform-Neutral Generic Services Client Applications” and published as WO2004059938; PCT/CA2003/001980 entitled, “System and Method of Building Wireless Component Applications” and published as WO2004059957; and PCT/CA2003/001981 entitled, “System and Method of Creating and Communicating with Component Based Wireless Applications” and published as WO2004059939, each of which is assigned to the owner of the present application and herein incorporated by reference.
Generally speaking, an integrated development environment (IDE) is provided to assist developers to efficiently develop such component-based applications. Thus, it is further desired to provide a solution to assist developers of wireless applications to define applications for multi-mode operation that takes advantage of existing programming tools.